Point WordPress Domain

I am looking into purchasing a domain to call my own, but I do not want to lose my current SEO and rankings, is there any way I can make my .worpress domain automatically forward to another site? Not sure if this is what the domain mapping does.

No; you will lose your rankings. Technorati isn't smart enough to allow for that. I went through it in October, and it took two and a half months to get back to where I was before, which isn't bad considering the advantages of your own domain name.